The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon

Also by Arnold Krupat

FOR THOSE WHO COME AFTER (1985)

I TELL YOU NOW (edited with Brian Swann) (1987)

RECOVERING THE WORD (edited with Brian Swann) (1987)

The Voice in the Margin

THE VOICE

IN THE MARGIN

Native American

Literature and the Canon

Arnold Krupat

University of California Press

Berkeley / Los Angeles / Oxford

Part of Chapter 4 appeared in different form in Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, ed. Gerald Vizenor and published by the University of New Mexico Press whose permission to reprint is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. Oxford, England Copyright © 1989 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Krupat, Arnold. The voice in the margin: Native American literature and the canon Arnold Krupat. p. cm.

Bibliography: p. Includes index.

ISBN 0-520-06669-3 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-520-06827-0 (pbk) 1. American literature—Indian authors—History and criticism— Theory, etc. 2. Indian literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Indians in literature. 4. Canon (Literature) I. Title. PS153.I52K78 1989 810.9'897—dc20 89-4966

CIP

Printed in the United States of America 123456789 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ANSI Z39.48.1984

For Donald Bahr and Jimmie Durham

Contents

Contents

Introduction

1. The Concept of the Canon

2. Criticism and the Canon

3. Native American Literature and the Canon

4. Monologue and Dialogue in Native American Autobiography

5. Local, National, Cosmopolitan Literature

Conclusion

Works Cited

Index

Introduction

This book is intended as a contribution to American cui- turai history—of the past, the present, and, at least imaginably, the future—with special reference to the Native American component of that history. I assume rather than argue that, in point of historical fact, American culture has had, has now, and will continue to have some relation to Native American culture—although that relation has most frequently been one of avoidance. As a result, most commentators on American culture generally have managed to proceed as though there were no relation between the two, white and red, Euramerican and Native American, as if absence rather than avoidance defined the New World: as if America was indeed virgin land, empty, uninhabited, silent, dumb until the Europeans brought the plow and the pen to cultivate its wilderness. From the first days of settlement, Americans sought to establish their own sense of American civilization in opposition to some centrally significant Other, most particularly to the Indian savage. Until a scant thirty-five years ago, the cultural history of America was written pretty exclusively from the point of view of those who had triumphed in the contest between civilization and savagism, in Roy Harvey Pearce’s terms, with the result that the voice of the Other was simply silenced, not to be heard. But there is always a return of the repressed in one form or another: and now it is no longer possible to pretend the Other is simply silent or absent because the formerly conquered write—as they fight— back. Today, the commentator on American culture who ignores or resists this fact does so at the risk of guaranteeing his or her own irrelevance to any attempt both to understand the world or to change it.

Of course there is no such thing as American culture or its history as a totality, not as an object of ordinary experience or a subject of academic study. Instead, there are the bits and pieces of text and hearsay we sojourners and students in this land unsystematically encounter or intellectually categorize. My special concern is that aspect of culture somewhat vaguely called literary, what for the University exists as American literature—periodized (Early American Literature, Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Civil War to First World War, Twentieth-Century American Literature, etc.) and thematized (The American Adam, The Machine and The Garden, American Romanticism, Love and Death in the American Novel, etc.) to the point of virtual reification. Such periodization and thematization, as Nina Baym has shown it to do for literature by women, ¹ also works to exclude Native literary expression as part of American literature. You cannot make sense of Indian song and story as a prelude to sectional war among the whites or as related to their innocent dreams and their subsequent disillusionment by experience. Of course the University, like the culture at large, does permit a certain marginalized existence to Native American literature, but, as is the case with all subaltern discourse, one’s objects of study at the margins are organized somewhat differently: if presented at all, there is Native American oral/traditional literature, or contemporary Native American fiction and poetry, the first treated so far as possible as a body of work untainted by Europe, the other as just-as-good-as the European, in appearance rather like the European, for all that it is marked by certain traces—which the specialist can make manifest in the classroom—of its Other origins. Unlike the situation that prevails, so far as I can tell, in folklore departments, or in some departments of anthropology or religion, center and margin rarely if ever come into fruitful contact so far as the formalized, institutional instruction of literature is concerned.

What chiefly marks the Americanist critic off from the Native Americanist critic today is the relation of each to that thing called theory. Although there are, to be sure, some notable exceptions, Indianists (at least so far as their professional affiliations are to Departments of English rather than folklore or anthropology) have kept their distance from theory rather more than Americanists. It seems worth a moment’s speculation as to the reasons for and the consequences of this.

Sigmund Freud late in his life wrote that resistance to psychoanalysis was an inevitability inasmuch as psychoanalysis based itself theoretically upon what Freud called a third blow to human narcissism. ² After the Copernican wound, affirming that we humans occupied not the center of the universe but just another planet revolving around the sun, and after the Darwinian wound, demonstrating that we humans were not descended from the angels of heaven but ascended from the apes of the jungle, the psychoanalytic wound came to say that we were not even masters in our own house: if we were indeed

sole possessors of reason, we were not exclusively ruled by it. I imagine Paul de Man wished to appropriate something of Freud’s unanswerability (albeit with that characteristically canny irony, a sophisticated and somewhat more benign version of what Nixon and Reagan developed into the fine art of plausible deniability) ³ in his already-classic account of The Resistance to Theory. The resistance de Man specified was hardly a resistance to literary theory as such, but, rather—the tag references are unfortunate and I ask their indulgence only as a shorthand—to theory in the poststructuralist, Derridaean, deconstructive, or, as I will say shortly, New Rhetorical mode. But in Native American studies there has been and continues to be a resistance to theory tout court.

Those who resist theory in Native American studies tend to see it as aligned with the first term of apparently dichotomous sets such as analysis/experience, abstract/concrete, library work/fieldwork, reason/intuition, even culture/nature—sets that (usually quite unknowingly—but resistance to theory, as I see it, is precisely a will to unknowing) would resurrect in practice a structuralist commitment to binary opposition that has been fairly well discredited (in theory). The sets I have referred to are, in turn, equated with a thoroughly historical opposition between the east and the west. The east, which currently includes California most of the time and Chicago some of the time, is culture, books, analysis, and, of course, theory. The west, which usually is limited to Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, and the Dakotas, is raw nature, personal contact, the authority of concrete experience, and so, to be sure, no theory. Once we recall that Indians, in American symbology, from the first moment of contact, were always equated to nature and, from at least the Indian Removal Act of 1830, have been considered of the west, the distance between students of Native American literature and literary theorists becomes understandable.4

The consequence of this situation is that one feels put in the position of having to choose between the two terms set in putative opposition, as if it were not really possible to write on Indian subjects without presenting one’s bona fides in terms of having danced at powwows with so and so or having been taken as blood brother by so and so, as if one’s analyses required the authority of personal experience to be valid, as if he whö had much experience of Native culture must automatically produce valid analyses of it. Or it is as if one were called upon—I can offer this for its metaphorical force at the least— to read either the Wicazo Sa Review out of the Indian Studies Center of Eastern Washington University, Akwesasne Notes, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, or Diacritics, Critical Inquiry, Social Text, and Cultural Critique. It seems to me important however to resist such false choices. Anyone interested in the study of Indian literature today needs to read all of these journals, or as many as possible. And to read them more nearly under the sign of sameness than of difference, as engaged in parallel projects, equivalently (if differently) useful for the understanding of Native American and Euramerican culture. To resist this is to continue to perpetuate an us/ them universe. And, as I hope this book will show, that is something I find objectionable in the extreme.

There has been a great deal of talk lately about the need to listen to different voices, to allow the Other to speak, to experiment in the direction of producing dialogic and polyphonic texts. I take up these matters in relation to quite specific critical problems in the pages that follow. In keeping with the purposes appropriate to an Introduction, however, I want to offer some general comments here.

With writing open to otherness or Otherness, it is as with apartheid: you can find almost no one explicitly opposed to the former as you can find almost no one explicitly in favor of the latter. Such pandemic agreement usually indicates wide definitional latitude for the terms under discussion along with a fairly considerable distance from and/or indifference to any real consequences that might ensue from one’s position. Just here, I want to consider briefly what it might actually mean to do ethnography, history, or literary criticism with an openness to otherness; in particular, whether this would be to include (somehow) the other’s point of view or, rather, to adopt (somehow) the other’s point of view.

If it is the former, cultural studies are in relatively good shape. Among the anthropologists, one would be hard put today to discover an ethnographer indifferent to the Native’s view of things, committed only to a full and relentless translation of the Native voice into Western terms. As a branch of historical studies, the discipline of ethnohistory, not yet having celebrated its fiftieth birthday, can already take pride in its accomplishments. Less and less will the historian of Indianwhite relations consider Native American actions only in terms of Euramerican categories of understanding. Literary studies lag a bit behind anthropology and history in these regards; there still remain those who assume that Indians have nothing to say worthy of critical scrutiny, that Indians are the academic responsibility of anthropologists or government bureaucrats, not of literary critics. And there are those who read Native American literature as if it consisted of texts written by an incidentally red William Carlos Williams, William Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf. A considerable body of work is currently accumulating, nonetheless, that is concerned to trace the difference as well as the sameness of Indian literature in relation to the Western tradition, with reference to particular linguistic and ethnographic detail.

All this is easy enough to remark. But what if the call to polyphony quite literally intends not so much the inclusion of the Indian point of view but its adoption as one’s own? One thing this might mean—although the abundant debates among ethnographic theorists today do not usually put it this way—is a return to the ernie mode in anthropology, to the old Boasian concern to present things from the Native point of view.⁵ Thus a present-day ernie ethnography might be, as Richard K. Nelson says of his own work with the Koyukon,

a native natural history … outside the established realm of Western science, though it has been organized and filtered through a Western mind, (xiv)

Such a text would attempt to come as close as possible to conveying another culture from that culture’s own view, sacrificing any claim to general explanatory (scientific) force in the interest of a particularized authenticity. But many of those attracted to the other’s point of view envision something even more radical than what Nelson provides in his Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest, abandoning scientific claims to explanation and even, as I understand it, claims to authenticity in the interest of an affectively evocative criticism in what I can only term the religious mode.

Of course, to adopt the point of view of the other quite literally might lead to the abandonment of critical activity altogether as simply to no point. As Stephen Tyler, perhaps foremost among those calling for the adoption of other-than- Western-scientific ways of encountering the world, writes of the Koya, thought and thinking— and by extension, I assume, what we would call the products of thought and thinking, or culture— are not major topics of discourse. The first Koya symposium is yet to be held and what people say, do, and desire is far more important than what they think about thought. (1984, 35)6

Ethnographic writing in the Koya mode, if it were actually to be carried on, would have in common with religious discourse, as Edward Said has noted, that it serves as an agent of closure, shutting off human investigation, criticism, and effort to achieve understanding (1983, 290).

Alternatively, Tyler, as is well known, has called for an equivalently religious postmodern anthropology, which would no longer produce documents of the occult but, instead, occult documents. One would here abandon the Western aim of representing (and so of knowing or understanding) culture and instead seek to evoke cultural world views, a kind of anthropological poetics rather than an anthropological science—but, to be sure, a particular kind of poetics, one that sees the poem as a quasi- mystical embodiment or incarnation of—whatever. As P. Steven Sangren has noted, even for those who approve this turn, it has thus far been easier to talk about such ethnographic texts than actually to produce them.

Something of this sort might also be said for the hope of writing history, at least the history of Native Americans, from an Indian point of view. Calvin Martin has recently called for a shift from the Western anthropological view of history to the Indian biological view, and quoted approvingly Robin Ridington’s statement that

the true history of these people [Indians] will have to be written in a mythic language … it will have to combine stories of people coming together with other people, and those that tell of people coming together with animals. (216-217)

Writes Martin, As long as thejapasas of this land [Japasa was a Beaver Indian who told Ridington his stories] insist on linking their life-force to that of Nature around and within them, we historians are obliged to write about them in just those terms (215). The logic of this escapes me entirely— although Martin’s own pages argue and attempt to persuade by means that Westerners would recognize as logical—for nothing logically obliges the critic to write in any particular way. The strongest ethical case can be made for taking the subject’s own view of things seriously, as worthy of detailed attention and acknowledgment, but this does not necessarily entail as a consequence the adoption of just those terms.

The equivalent to this sense of obligation in literary studies concerned with Native Americans is the sort of criticism which, in the rather mystical—and, indeed, mystifying— old-fashioned way of Mary Austin or Natalie Curtis Burlin, reads Indian literature to hear the wind whistling through the pages, to feel the change of the seasons chapter to chapter, to note the shape of the surrounding hills in every line, as if that was actually what Native performers themselves intended, or what their words executed. The power of Indian literary expression, in this egregiously mistaken comprehension of the Indian point of view, has little to do with the artistry of gifted individuals shaping a subtle and complex tradition, but, rather, with the ancientness of racial wisdom, or some such. The newer fashion in mystification is foremost propounded by N. Scott Momaday, as in his recent assertion, also in Martin’s book, that there are "intrinsic variables in man’s perception of his universe, variables that are determined to some real extent on the basis of his genetic constitution" (Martin, 156; my emphasis). Momaday illustrates his understanding of the genetic determinants of perception by explaining that his probable answer to a child’s question, Where does the sun live? would have to be true to "my experience, my deepest, oldest experience, the memory in my blood" (Martin, 157; my emphasis). Now, there is no gene for perception, no such thing as memory in the blood—this latter construction by now almost a catchphrase for Momaday. Momaday has become almost an iconic figure for those interested in Native American literature, but, as I shall have occasion to note later, this particular aspect of his work (along with his continuing refusal, as in the first quotation above, to generalize gender reference to include women as significant humans), only places unnecessary obstacles in the way of a fuller understanding and appreciation of Native American literature.

I say unnecessary obstacles because Momaday’s following account of Jemez and Navajo senses of where the sun lives (it lives in the earth, not in the sky) in no way requires Indians to have some special genetic constitution, for such a sense, nor to acquire that sense from any memory in [the] blood.7

It is quite possible without the mystifications of Momaday and Martin, to be overwhelmingly impressed by Native American culture and to grant fully that native American cultural production is based upon a profound wisdom that is most certainly different from a Western, rationalistic, scientistic, secular perspective. Nor can anyone who would comment on Native American culture ignore the perspective from which it is produced. But that does not mean that one is obliged to adopt that perspective or to insist on the absolute difference of it from the perspectives of the West. I would instance here the statement by Larry Evers and Felipe Molina in their recent study of Yaqui deer songs to the effect that, we work for two goals: for the continuation of deer songs as a vital part of life in Yaqui communities and for their appreciation in all communities beyond. Most of the time these goals coincide. (8)

I will return to Evers and Molina, if only briefly, in the final chapter of this book. Here, let me note only that their two goals, coincidental at least Most of the time, can only be achieved by those with the patience, perhaps I might even say the Keatsian negative capability, to work with both an Indian and a Western perspective.

For the Western culture-worker, this requires resisting the temptation—to put the matter bluntly—of trying to be an Indian (more modestly, to proceed strictly as an Indian) in one’s

work. For some the former option is far more dramatic than merely trying to understand Indians sympathetically, or practicing secular criticism in anthropology, history, or literary studies. Given the abundantly documented failures of social science to fulfill some of its formerly exaggerated promises of understanding (and, more grimly, of control), that temptation is all the greater. Science, in the terms of Jean-François Lyotard, is just another one of those grands récits, the large narratives or stories that have failed. Such a view—the formulation here is again Sangren’s—mistakes science as a value for science as an authority, assuming that if the authority of science as a privileged way to sure truth or knowledge has been shown to be mistaken, so, too, must science as a value be shown to be mistaken. Along with a number of other commentators, I would suggest that this conclusion is not only unnecessary, illogical, and premature, but that it leaves its proponents with no recourse but to turn to a religious criticism that is ultimately dependent on the continuing blind faith of its proponents and its audience. This turn, I would claim with Edward Said, seems largely the result of exhaustion … [and] disappointment (1983, 291); with Said, I would encourage resistance to it.

For all these strong words, I would not want to be understood as denying that one might learn from the Indians themselves how to produce a more accurate criticism of Indian literature. I think here particularly of Dennis Tedlock’s observation that Zuni storytellers comment on their stories and those stories’ past performances in the act of the storytelling itself as a form of critical activity; ⁸ recently, as I will show, Leslie Silko has affirmed some similar interests and practices among Laguna storytellers. I can generalize that to work critically, not religiously, in an Indian way with Indian literature may mean above all to offer commentary on the effectiveness of variants. Other criticism than this, from the reading I have done, I do not see Native Americans attempting, turning their attention, like the Koya, to other matters. I hope students of Indian literatures will make this part of their work, and I hope some sense of this Indian way of working has, if only implicitly, been included in what is to follow, although it has not been adopted as a governing perspective.

For all that, I should nonetheless acknowledge that this study is somewhat deficient in that I have only in very small degree managed to include noncanonical or indigenous critical approaches to literature along with noncanonical authors and literary texts. With the help of work by Houston Baker, Hazel Carby, Henry Louis Gates, Jose Limon, Jose David Saldivar, Ramon Saldivar, and Gerald Vizenor, among others, I hope soon to do better along these lines. Others interested in Native American literature are no doubt doing better even as I write.

Let me turn here to some explicit indication of my own sense of polyphony, my quite modest techniques for including otherness and difference. To borrow John Ellis’s distinction, ⁹ I have taken the call to dialogism and polyphony (from Bakhtin foremost among others) as offering good advice (although advice of a very particular sort) rather than a theory (with its almost inevitable commitment to opposing other theories). This is to say that my own sense of the call to polyphony understands it as urging the refusal of imperial domination, and so of the West’s claim legitimately to speak for all the Rest. Neither a formal theory nor a program, this call is, rather, an exhortation to proceed humbly and with care; it asks that we Westerners stop shouting, as it were, and that we speak with our ears open. Such a call does not bring with it—inasmuch as formal choices do not of themselves convey moral and political values—the requirement that we write in certain ways, or for that matter that we refrain from writing in certain ways, (e.g., that we